Socialism in Greece

Following the results of the May 21 polls, where New Democracy party secured a resounding victory, the election period leading up to the second ballot is focusing on the individual parameters of the party programs.

Party staffs, meanwhile, are on the lookout for misstatements, verbal exaggerations or signs of ignorance from their political opponents.

The leader of the leftist SYRIZA party, Alexis Tsipras, along with the party's senior officials, are busy analyzing the reasons behind their landslide defeat in the legislative elections held on May 21. This process of introspection is expected to continue even after the second ballot on June 25.

SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras has emphasized the need for his party to overcome the shock of the May 21 elections and rally their fighting spirit as they prepare for the repeat election on June 25.

Konstantinos Tasoulas has been reelected as the speaker of Parliament with 270 votes.

Lawmakers from New Democracy, SYRIZA, PASOK, and Greek Solution voted in favor, while Communist Party (KKE) MPs voted "present."

In a roll call vote with 296 participating MPs, 270 voted "yes" and 26 voted "present."

A leadership change in the main opposition party, left-wing SYRIZA, will have to wait until the June 25 election, if at all.

The 300 MPs elected on May 21 were sworn in Sunday afternoon.

The new Parliament, in which no party achieved an overall majority, will elect a Speaker and deputy speakers Monday. It will then be dissolved by presidential decree, either Monday or Tuesday, and new elections proclaimed, for June 25.

SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras told his party's central committee on Thursday that he takes responsibility for the result of the May 21 elections. 

Dora Antoniou, Kathimerini's political editor, joins Thanos Davelis to break down what went wrong for SYRIZA and Alexis Tsipras in Sunday's elections, what this defeat means for the party looking ahead, and whether this is now PASOK and Nikos Androulakis' big chance to reclaim the center-left. 

Following its disastrous showing in the May 21 election, where it lost more than 11 percentage points, main opposition SYRIZA is now talking about preventing Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his New Democracy party from becoming too powerful by clawing back some of the 20-percentage point gap separating the two big parties.

The system of simple proportional representation used in the May 21 elections was a wasteful, inconvenient and costly choice - a price we paid due to the opportunism of SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras, which mirrored the opportunism of the late socialist leader Andreas Papandreou.